We need better sources of news. It is somewhat happening already with the rise of individual 'reporters' on YouTube and other social media who amass followers and support themselves with patronage, advertising, merchandise, etc...
Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
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Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#62When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic? Journalism is a bit of a personal frustration of mine. It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Maybe not so…
Journalists are stuck to doing the whims of owners and advertisers. We don't have a funding model purely for journalism as a mainstream practice. We do have federal funding grants for certain journalistic practices, and that journalism tends to be excellent and also completely ignored , such as focused reporting on the intersection of indigenous nationhood and the USA court system. (If that reporting were more widely…
I have been following some
News stories in depth recently and honestly you can find more neutral coverage and better analysis on some random YouTube video or reddit thread then you do on professional print / tv journalism (which given the sort of biased and selective reporting I see on both sides is either deliberately misleading or completely incompetent)
At this point I think the problem to solve isn’t “journalism“. The problem is the level of respect we as a society give to traditional journalism.
I think traditional journalism had 3 functions:
1. Spread Information
2. Curate Information
3. Conduct investigation/ long form analysis.
————
1. Has been made obsolete by the internet
2. Has been hijacked by algorithms that seek to maximize attention to ads, and therefore inadvertently outrage. I think there is some opportunity for a tech enabled disruption here.
3. Is tremendously valuable. I am not sure what the funding model looks like. But I think we will figure out a solution at some point.
I see no value in trying to save legacy journalism. The only reason we accord it so much prestige is due to social inertia from a bygone era.
Why I should give CNN or Fox any more credibility than I would give a TiKTok video at this point?
Or value a New York Times article on covid more than listening to a couple podcasts with subject matter experts and looking at the data online ?
I think we need to embrace the internet.
There are issues with curation, but possibly solutions as well.
For eg. Maybe we can empower users to choose their own social media curation algorithms and control their feed. Rather than trying to sell their attention to the highest bidder. We would need to find a different monetization model etc.
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#63Personal opinion: I think it was around 2004 when the media slowly stopped being the journalists that protect our democracy, and instead corporations and individuals with political agendas. Sure there were plenty of newspapers and outlets that leaned one way or the other, but it was never so blatantly partisan, to the point of suspect. Journalists are not the enemy of the people, but the media of today certainly does…
> Personal opinion: I think it was around 2004 when the media slowly stopped being the journalists that protect our democracy, and instead corporations and individuals with political agendas.
It's literally always been that way.
For a while in the late 20th Century US, the alignment of the propaganda interests of the major US media was such that it spoke with almost a single voice, but the homogeneity wasn't some kind of virtuous objectivity.
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#64Now is a wonderful time to read these words of Wisdom of PG https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1278678974500147202 "Journalists used to have a monopoly on the news. This power bred restraint; whatever their private feelings, they avoided overt personal attacks. Now this power and the consequent restraint are both evaporating. Now they're just Twitter users."
Power doesn't breed restraint.
It doesn't seem odd to me.
Whether you agree with it or not, the idea that an industry recognizes their power and respects it doesn't seem that outlandish.
Maybe you're the part of the problem?
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#65When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic? Journalism is a bit of a personal frustration of mine. It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Maybe not so…
Every democracy should have a government funded independent news organization, and most do. The major exception being the US. The solution is tried and true but the political will is lacking.
You mean like Al Jazeera, or RT, or the BBC...?
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What's more important for a nation than the media informing people is the media being on the same page and projecting a similar image So like this? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/business/media/sinclair-n... > I don't believe that the facts really matter that much overall. But if you lose the "shared reality", you're losing cohesion. So you'd rather live in a made up fantasy world as long as we all share the sam…
> So like this? Well, yes. I mean, we've had that in a more sophisticated way for the longest time via press agencies. They deliver the news to the media companies, the editors rewrite it a bit to match their audience's taste and add a bit of opinion, but the basic facts are the same. Sinclair was probably just too cheap to spend the extra few bucks to hire somebody to write 20 scripts that have the same content but…
>I'd prefer if we all shared reality.
Unfortunately, unless you can see out of my eyes and think my thoughts, you and I, as well as you and everyone else will not share reality.
That's what being human is, we all live in our own reality.
>You'll have a hard time communicating when you don't share reality.
It's worked for thousands of years. You don't need to share reality to communicate with people, you need to be able to stop and see their reality for a bit, understand it's different than yours and be ok with this.
I just want to seriously ask, on a planet with 7 billion people scattered around the world how can you possibly expect everyone to share the same reality?
How is the reality of people from two completely different places in the world ever going to be the same?
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Are you sure it's that important to have an informed citizenry? I'd say we've never had one, anywhere. We've had some people being informed, sure, but the masses have never been informed well. They've been lead and entertained. If it's tha…
> We've had some people being informed, sure, but the masses have never been informed well. They've been lead and entertained. If it's that important, how have we made it this far? Your whole comment isn't exactly wrong, but what's worked in the past does not constitute a guaranteed path forward. We've also never had a populous with such ready access to information, both raw and interpreted, before.
That's true, but I'm not sure that that's different from before either. As technology and wealth progressed, that has likely been true plenty of times. I'm not convinced that anything has fundamentally changed, and I don't think that the population made decisions by being informed. Instead, they were being informed and that formed their decision.
Does it matter that we now have 8000 TV channels readily available? Is that meaningfully different from having 50? Sure, we now have the internet which is theoretically a two-way-medium (but for most users, it's one-way), and that may change some things and make the whole system more fragile, because it's much harder to control a narrative and suppress information now, but I don't see it changing the basic relationship between citizenry and media (at least not yet).
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#68Journalism is dying because the quality the average journalist produces is no better than what can be had for free from amateurs writing blogs and tweets. They are 100% responsible for their own downfall and the compromises it has forced on them.
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Former journalist here. Spot. On.
Can you recommend primers, explainers, autobiographies, collection of war stories? Something accessible to laypersons like me? After my own unsuccessful efforts, I started collecting books and articles about lawmaking (legislation). It'd be really great to have similar resources for investigative journalism.
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
Various works by many of these individuals: https://freedom.press/about/board/
Re: Journalists aren’t the enemy of the people. But we’re not your friends either
#70When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic? Journalism is a bit of a personal frustration of mine. It's so important to the function of our society to have an informed population, but we don't, and it's because of the consistent lying that is done by journalists that we don't. Maybe not so…
> When was the last time you read a news article about a topic where you are an expert, and walked away from it thinking that it would help laymen better understand the topic?
If you really think there's such a clear connection between your prompt and the claim that follows it, put your money where your mouth is.
On any news article posted here on HN that's outside your field, post a response that the article should not be trusted. Cite as evidence a different article from that news organization that is in your own field where you found glaring errors.
Then judge from the responses and up/downvotes how much HN values your analysis.